Tag: Jerusalem

To pay his tuition fees, he had a job in a clothing store serving Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. He was working there on Monday, 29 February, when two Israeli soldiers drove into the camp, reportedly by mistake.

Fadi Shaludi, 14, has not left his house since November. Every day, he sees the children from his neighborhood go off to school. He especially misses playing football with his friends and walking around Jerusalem’s Old City.

Fadi is under house arrest. He fears going downstairs, let alone to the corner shop next to his home. His punishment came after he was charged with throwing stones at Israeli troops during confrontations in Silwan, the area of occupied East Jerusalem where he lives, in October.

That incident also resulted in his mother, Shifa Obeido, being put under house arrest on charges of “incitement.” She awaits a trial that will likely see her forcibly transferred from Jerusalem.

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined five major emotional stages that people tend to go through while coping with the death or loss of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Over three months have passed since the killing of his son Bahaa, but Muhammad Alayan has not been able to experience any of them. The 60-year-old lawyer has been too immersed in the struggle to recover the body of his slain son to actually contemplate his loss.

“More than a hundred days have gone and I couldn’t sit with my wife and three (remaining) children at one table together and realize that there is an empty chair no longer occupied by Bahaa,” Muhammad Alayan told me. “We have had no time to discuss his absence because our entire lives have revolved around getting him back.”

When Muhannad Halabi stabbed two Israeli men to death and injured a woman and a baby in Jerusalem’s Old City, he started what many Palestinians have called the “intifada of the knives.”

Halabi was shot and killed by Israeli police during the attack in early October last year and the 19-year-old law student was branded a “terrorist” by the media. His parents, however, have a sharply different view: they regard Muhannad as a hero.

“I will always be proud that my son sacrificed his life for the liberation of his homeland,” said his mother Suhair.

In his final posting on Facebook, Muhannad expressed deepanger about the incursions of Israeli settlers into the compound around al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. He had just watched a video of a Palestinian woman being arrested by Israeli police at al-Aqsa.

“You are so precious to us! It’s only when you were taken away from us that we realised how indispensable you are,” squealed Umm Hussam as she embraced Zinat al-Jallad, commonly known as Umm Ihab, in a tight embrace.

It was Umm Ihab’s first day back among her “sisters’ in Bab Hutta in the Old City after four days in an Israeli jail and an additional five days under house arrest. There’s little need to ask the women gathered around Umm Ihab how much she means to them as their reception of her speaks volumes. The 61-year-old cuts a motherly figure even to her older friends.

“We couldn’t sleep when she was arrested,” Ikram al-Ghazzawi told MEE. “I wished I could do something, anything, to free her. We cannot imagine our lives without her,” she added.

“Umm Ihab is universally loved because she supports everyone in need,” said Zina Amr. “When any of us is arrested, Umm Ihab is always the first to come to our hearings and to welcome us when we are released. Her tenderness and defiance is an example for all of us,” added Amr, before handing out letters of support that the women have received from Algeria in which Algerian women stress their solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem. Continue reading “The steadfast women of Al-Aqsa remain defiant”→

Whenever Palestinians stand up for their rights in Jerusalem, it is a safe bet that Samer Abu Eisheh will be there. It is hard to imagine a protest near the Damascus Gate — an entrance to the Old City — without his bellowing voice.

It is hard to believe that Hadil Awwad’sroom has been abandoned for more than two weeks. It is clean, tidy and smells beautiful.

Teddy bears of many colors are scattered on the two sides of her bed. Hadil received them as a gift from one of her brothers when he returned from China. Even as she turned 14 she continued to keep those teddy bears in her room.

Her new jacket that she had bought recently and only wore once is hanging in the wardrobe.